The ListView.DrawItem event enables you to customize the appearance of a ListView control using owner drawing.

The ListView.DrawItem event is raised by a ListView control when the ListView.OwnerDraw property is set to true. The DrawListViewItemEventArgs passed to the event handler contains information about the ListViewItem to draw and also provides methods to help you draw the item.

To avoid issues with graphics flickering when owner drawing, override the ListView control and set the DoubleBuffered property to true. This feature is available only on Windows XP and the Windows Server 2003 family when your application calls the Application.EnableVisualStyles method.

The following code example demonstrates how to provide custom drawing for a ListView control. The ListView control in the example has a gradient background. Subitems with negative values have a red foreground and a black background.

A handler for the ListView.DrawItem event draws the background for entire items. A handler for the ListView.DrawSubItem event draws the text values and both the text and background for subitems that have negative values. A handler for the DrawColumnHeader event draws each column header.

A ContextMenu component provides a way to switch between the details view and the list view. In the list view, only the ListView.DrawItem event is fired. In this case, the text and background are both drawn in the ListView.DrawItem event handler.